One Here, One Now
How Time and Space Unfold from Dimensionless Consciousness (The Nature of Consciousness #40)
Every experience any of us has ever had took place now. Our earliest memory, at the time it occurred, occurred now; the reading of this sentence is taking place now; and whatever arises tomorrow will, when it arises, arise now. The now in which experience takes place never moves or changes. It is thought that stretches this single, ever-present now into the line of time along which our lives seem to run.
The passage we explore this week asks whether the same understanding may be extended to place. Just as there is only one now, shared by all people and all experience, might there be only one here, which perception diversifies into the apparent multiplicity of locations in space?
This week, we conclude Chapter 16, ‘The Memory of Our Eternity’, exploring pages 162–165.*
(*The page numbers indicated here each week refer to the original publication of the physical book – they may vary slightly from more recent versions, owing to the publisher’s design modifications.)
The Same Moment, the Same Place
Each of us seems to view the world from our own location. I am here, you are there, and the distance between us seems as real and self-evident as the passage of time from yesterday to today. Yet the understanding that time is an appearance, an expansion of the eternal now performed by thought, opens a parallel possibility for space.
Just as now is the same eternal ‘moment’ for all people, which thought subsequently expands or unfolds as time, could it be that here is the same ‘place’ for all people, only seemingly diversified into a multiplicity of separate places in space by the activity of perception?
The now in which your experience takes place is the same now in which everyone’s experience takes place, and it is thought that unfolds this single moment as the apparent stream of time. Perhaps perception performs for place what thought performs for time. Perhaps the here from which each of us seems to experience the world is one and the same here, and its apparent scattering into countless separate locations belongs to the activity of perceiving rather than to reality itself.
